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Free advice: buy a dongle

There is still no Wi-Fi on the northeast corridor Amtrak trains that carry hundreds of thousands of business travelers each day. So quit whining and get a USB 3G modem. It’s free with monthly service, which is tax-deductible. For the $60/month I pay Verizon, I can connect my laptop to the internet from any train, bus, boat, lounge, lobby, conference room, coffee shop, or just about any other environment to which modern business takes me.

20 thoughts on “Free advice: buy a dongle”

Better yet, the Verizon MyFi doesn’t clog up a USB port. I’ve been using one borrowed from the office lately and it’s come in very handy. Of course, it’s not very fast, but that’s Verizon’s network, not the device.

I love my Sprint Dongle. The only real issue with Sprint/Verizon/AT&T Data Cards is their Transfer Limit of 5GBs. Sprint’s 4G cards (Baltimore, Atlanta & other areas) are limitless. I don’t completely understand why they have limits other than to charge you more. I had one $200 bill one month. Yes it’s tax deductible, but I can’t wait until Sprint turns up their 4G in my area.

another fee to connect to the internet ontop of the two already being paid to the internet gatekeepers is hard to swallow at this point. i am a small one man shop traveling around and i dont think i can make that happen. so i will continue to complain or until Amtrak installs wifi which is on the horizon.

I just picked up one of these last week and instantly fell in love. Its not only a modem but a 5 port router with all the regular features you’d expect in a home setup. And as for the speed Sprints on top of Verizon for the moment.

I had 2 show verizon ‘the door’ when they started charging me 4 roaming in Mexico. I don’t cross over into Mexico. They practically said that they couldn’t care less, that I still had 2 pay roaming charges.

I too have the MiFi, and have replaced my home internet with it. It’s helpful for client meetings, working on the train, last-minute homework on the El on the way to school, and conferences where the hotel’s WiFi is being sucked dry.

The only thing I really don’t like about it is the 5GB limit. I work with it, but I’d like to do some more heavy lifting on occasion, and I just can’t. Going over causes some HEFTY fines. I might go back to a cheap at-home monthly internet service just to get unlimited service again.

Get an unlocked mid-tier smart phone, a Nokia N75 will do, buy the “dumbphone” data package and tether your heart out. This approach will pay for itself in a couple of mo’s when you consider the new smartphone data rates.

While Brad’s advice might work, it’s a good way to get your cell phone service cut off or receive a $10,000 phone bill. The major phone companies disallow tethering in their user agreements, and penalties for tethering range from account termination to notice-free change to a pay-per-byte plan.

Love my Verizon USB modem thing. Yeah, it uses a USB port but my iBook has two. A week or so ago, I was in Boulder, MT. This is a sleepy little town just south of Helena on I-15. The signal may have not been the fastest but it was entirely usable. In fact there’s very few places anymore that I haven’t been able to find a usable Verizon or shared network signal.

^o^
—Look! Up in the sky? It’s a bird? It’s a plane? No! It’s The Bat!

I’ve got a Sprint 3G USB cellmodem, $59.99/mo, had it about 14 months now. It’s unlimited data. I can even share out my connection to my wifes Mac over airport. However I heard the new ones are data limited to 5GB, which is useless because we blast over that barely doing anything. And I hear the overage fees are huge. Looks like for now, at least, mine is still grandfathered in for unlimited data and I’ll keep renewing it monthly until that goes away.